James Poulos writes about political news, focusing on our choices for liberty and our options for reform. He's a columnist at The Daily Beast, the host of the Free Radicals podcast, and the frontman of a band called Black Hi-Lighter.

As The Locust Economy Hums, Google's Eric Schmidt Pronounces TV Dead

Speaking at a gathering of digital advertisers in New York City last night,” Jennifer O’Mahony reports, “Mr Schmidt refused to forecast when internet video would displace television, instead declaring: ‘That’s already happened.’”

“It’s not a replacement for something that we know,” he added. “It’s a new thing that we have to think about, to program, to curate and build new platforms.”

That buzz-laden language is all well and good. After all, we’re no strangers to creative destruction, in theory or in practice. But so many industries — from TV to film to music to journalism — are experiencing something better described as destructive destruction… and not for the kinds of reasons that make us feel all moved, touched, and inspired about our political economy.

Typically, the antidote to these fears comes in the form of an elevated capitalist consciousness. And, again, there’s no problem with that. In fact, much of what John Mackey is selling and investing in actually does have the powerful possibility of moving and touching and inspiring people. (And paying them.)

Still.

There’s a deeper cut to be made into the questions surrounding such profound disruption of so many tentpoles of human endeavor. Steven Soderbergh — a man supremely sheltered from the buffeting winds of destruction, yet still running for cover — gets it. In what Bret Easton Ellis called a “devastating” keynote address at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival this Saturday, Soderbergh laid bare the brutal nonsense crippling the already-palsied film industry.

“Now, I’m going to attempt to show how a certain kind of rodent might be smarter than a studio when it comes to picking projects,” Soderbergh says at one representative point. I’ll leave the gory details to him concerning why films cost so much and turn out so dumb so often. Even more important than that stuff is Soderbergh’s more general remarks, which cut to the heart of the economic issue despite their somewhat poetic cast. Consider:

I got my hands on a book by a guy named Douglas Rushkoff and I realized I’m suffering from something called Present Shock which is the name of his book. This quote made me feel a little less insane: “When there’s no linear tie, how is a person supposed to figure out what’s going on? There’s no story, no narrative to explain why things are the way things are. Previously distinct causes and effects collapse into one another. There’s no time between doing something and seeing the result. Instead the results begin accumulating and influencing us before we’ve even completed an action. And there’s so much information coming in at once from so many different sources that there’s simply no way to trace the plot over time”. That’s the hum I’m talking about. And I mention this because I think it’s having an effect on all of us. I think it’s having an effect on our culture [...].

Hum? What is this hum? He explains:

I think that life is sort of like a drumbeat. It has a rhythm and sometimes it’s fast and sometimes it’s slower, and maybe what’s happening is this drumbeat is just accelerating and it’s gotten to the point where I can’t hear between the beats anymore and it’s just a hum. Again, I thought maybe that’s my generation, every generation feels that way, maybe I should ask my daughter. But then I remember somebody did this experiment where if you’re in a car and you’re going more than 20 miles an hour it becomes impossible to distinguish individual features on a human being’s face. I thought that’s another good analogy for this sensation.

Now these are really evocative words but without a little extra it’s hard to put the meat on the bones. Fortunately, over at Ribbon Farm, Venkatesh Rao helps us do exactly that — in a bracing, must-read post called “The Locust Economy.” Drawing from some disturbing pontifications on the subject of Groupon — its inherent self-dooming quality, the way in which it inexorably destroys the market it seemed at first to create and nourish — Rao redescribes our current economic situation by comparing today’s consumers — across industries and business sectors — to, you guessed it, locusts.

Locust swarms don’t create new value. At a systemic level, the most charitable thing that can be said about them is that they efficiently strip mine value in a tyranny-of-the-biomass-majority way. [...] Locust economies are built around 3-way markets: a swarming platform “organizer” player who efficiently disseminates information about transient, local resource surpluses, a locust species in dormant grasshopper mode, and a base for predation that exhibits a scarcity-abundance cycle.

So long as different locations are not synchronized, a locust market will usually have a surplus somewhere, even if it is a zero-sum or negative-sum market overall.Where that surplus comes from varies. [...] Unfortunately, within the human world, it seems that the prey base is usually some sort of small business sector (either independent or franchisee chains). I will call this the Jeffersonian middle class, as in economic actors driven by the producerist values espoused by Thomas Jefferson (basically “small, local and independent”).

Then Rao drops the other, multi-megaton shoe: “The war between the 1% and 99% seems to play out with the 1% and the 90% collaborating to prey on the 9% in the middle — the Jeffersonian middle class.”

For a guy like me who has alludedrepeatedly to the perilous political force of Barack Obama‘s ultrarich-poor coalition, Rao’s locustonomics theory puts the onus on corporate titans to account for where they stand on that social model. The ultrarich-poor coalition is not best viewed as a chance to snark yourself into a narcotic stupor about limousine liberals and welfare queens. Instead, here, as is so often the case, an apparently partisan jibe opens a narrow cognitive window onto a much more important and meaningful vista of human life and how we’re living it.

Where, then, does Eric Schmidt stand on the locust economy? How does he propose to use YouTube as a platform for productivity, not prey? YouTube’s push toward original content, as Forbes’s own TJ McCue suggests, is one promising sign: “Over one million creators are earning money from their YouTube videos.”

But now (not next fiscal year, not next election year) is the time for our CEOs to give up on politicians to lead the conversation on the locust economy, and start showing themselves to be true stakeholders in our shared economy.

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